Tuesday, March 30, 2010

StatCounter just recorded the 500,000th visitor to Orange Crate Art. Welcome, 500,000th visitor!

For big boys and girls, half a million visitors are all in a day’s work, or two. Not so here. Half a million visitors are a big deal.

I’m pretty certain that Visitor No. 500,000 is a friend who lives in ______, Illinois. She browses with Firefox in Windows XP. Sara, is that you? Your prizes are on their way.

Visitor No. 499,999 wondered about the truth of this statement: students can greet a professor by saying what’s up.

Uh, no. Sara would tell you that too.

I’m grateful to Visitor No. 499,999 (who may have received some serious edification by reading How to e-mail a professor). And I’m grateful to anyone who reads here. And if, reader, you’re reading the feed, in Google Reader or elsewhere, I’m grateful to you too. Stop by sometime and say hello. (Hello!)

I spent some time last night looking closely at the White House photograph of a draft page of President Barack Obama’s September 9, 2009 remarks to a joint session of Congress. The subject was health care.

From the first paragraph, original, re: Ted Kennedy:

But those who knew him and worked with him here — people of both parties — know the truth. It was the experience of having two children stricken with cancer; the sheer terror and helplessness that any parent feels when a child is sick; and his ability to imagine what it must be like for those without insurance . . . .

From the first paragraph, revised:

But those of us who knew Teddy and worked with him here — people of both parties — know the truth was more complicated than that. It was the experience of having two children stricken with cancer. He never forgot the sheer terror and helplessness that any parent feels when a child is sick; and he was able to imagine what it must be like for those without insurance . . . .

The first sentence now includes its speaker — “of us” — and is made more intimate — “Teddy.” The thinking becomes more complex: the truth is not a simple or single thing. The sentences that follow make their subject tireless and empathetic: “he never forgot”; “he was able to imagine.” Behold the power of verbs.

From the second paragraph, original:

That large-heartedness — that compassion — is not a partisan feeling.

From the second paragraph, revised:

That large-heartedness — that concern and regard for the plight of others — is not a partisan feeling.

I’m tempted to prefer the concision of “compassion,” but it makes sense that something large should follow “large-heartedness.” And what sounds greater to your ears? Compassion, or concern and regard for the plight of others? The revision also creates an attractive series of anapests (xx/): that conCERN,and reGARD,for the PLIGHT.

If you look at the photograph, you might be surprised by what happens as this paragraph continues: the sentences about Stanley Ann Dunham’s cancer and Sasha Obama’s meningitis are crossed out, as are lengthy handwritten additions to those sentences. Removing those brief accounts makes for a stronger tie between the statement about non-partisan feeling and the sentences that now follow.

Third paragraph, original:

For that too is part of the character of this country — our ability to stand in other people’s shoes; a recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand and that hard work and responsibility to family and community and country should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play that sometimes only a government can ensure.

Third paragraph, revised:

For that too is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people’s shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play — and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.

In the first sentence, the point that large-heartedness is neither Democratic nor Republican is sharper — large-heartedness is now American. And the sentence now ends with its most important noun, “character.” It’s probably only coincidence that the sentence now recalls the title of D.W. Brogan’s The American Character (1944).

The remainder of this paragraph, pre-revision, already sounds like Obama in its parallelism. But it’s a mighty long sentence to trek through. The revision breaks the sentence into more graspable (and thus more moving) elements. The parallelism becomes rousing, built not merely from “that” but from a series of nouns: “a recognition that,” “a belief that,” “an acknowledgement that.” Notice “in this country”: this is the way we do things. Notice too the urgency added to the final sentence, twice revised: an acknowledgment not that government “can help deliver on that promise” but that “sometimes government has to step in” to do so.

This draft page shows what anyone who writes and works at it comes to figure out, again and again: that everything is subject to revision, and that some things must be cut for the sake of the whole. I can imagine the President realizing at some point that the account of his family’s medical woes would not serve his purpose — that “it,” as they say, was not about him.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Consider the price. For a family sending a daughter or son to college, the iPad is an attractive alternative to a low-end Windows laptop (and half the price of a MacBook). . . .

The market that the iPad is to conquer: college students. That’s my hunch. (Now let’s see if I’m right.)

I think I’m going to be right. If not, at least I’m in good company. Here’s Steve Wozniak in the April 5 issue of Newsweek:

The iPad could lower the cost of acquiring computers for students. I think it’s going to be huge in the education market. Think about students going off to college. They want an Apple product, but their parents don’t want to spend that much. Now they have the ideal thing. They can go to college and someone may have a whacked-out $6,000 laptop, but the guy with the iPad will get all the attention.

I’ve been following writer and record-producer Chris Albertson’s posts at Stomp Off in C on record-producer John Hammond. (There are now one, two, three, four, five of them.) Scanning recent issues of the New Yorker this morning, I noticed this passage in a Sasha Frere-Jones piece on Bill Withers and the documentary film Still Bill:

Though the movie captures Withers criticizing the CBS A. & R. man who suggested that he cover Elvis Presley‘s “In the Ghetto,” in the eighties, his fiercest riposte to the white “blaxperts” can be found in an interview filmed for the 2005 reissue of “Just As I Am.”

“You gonna tell me the history of the blues? I am the goddam blues. Look at me. Shit. I’m from West Virginia, I’m the first man in my family not to work in the coal mines, my mother scrubbed floors on her knees for a living, and you’re going to tell me about the goddam blues because you read some book written by John Hammond? Kiss my ass.”

“CBS A. & R. man”: I’m guessing that New Yorker scruples about fact-checking require that the name be absent. But the paragraph that follows certainly implies that “In the Ghetto” was John Hammond’s idea.

Friday, March 26, 2010

After getting rid of 800 pounds of recycling and trash, hauling two SUV-loads of donations to Goodwill Industries, and dropping off 17 boxes of books at the public library, I am exhilarated by the newfound open space in my house, which seems bigger and more serene. . . . And I am more thoughtful about how I acquire, use and dispose of stuff.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Buddy Glass is leaving the scene of a canceled wedding. He sits with four other people in the back of a hired car:

Mrs. Silsburn smiled a smile that was at once worldly, wan, and enigmatic — the smile, as I remember, of a sort of jump-seat Mona Lisa.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963)

A sort of what?

In less safety-conscious times, the jump-seat was a familiar feature in cabs. Some jump-seats dropped down from the back of the front seat. Mrs. Silsburn and Buddy are sitting in jump-seats that face forward. Thus a “jump-seat Mona Lisa”: that’s what.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Vice President Joe Biden: “As I said just before the President signed the health care bill, I quoted Virgil, the classic Greek poet, who once said, ‘The greatest wealth is health.’”

Did the classical poet Virgil (or Vergil) “say” — that is, write — anything along these lines? If he did, he did so in Latin. He wasn’t talking Greek, or writing it. This mistake — not the other one — this one is a big, uh, deal.

[Update, March 24, 2010: I can find no evidence that these words belong to Virgil.]

In a concert full of big names, if one was forced to choose a standout performer at the tribute, it would have to be Van Dyke Parks. Playing in Canada for the first time, this veteran producer and keyboard player appeared to be having the time of his life — despite breathlessly confessing “I’m too old for this” — as he continued to appear on stage supporting other artists by laying down weird chords on his accordion or joyously splintering the melody on piano.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Oh. Sorry. So — I heard you saying something about “digital naïfs.” What did you mean by that?

I thought you’d never ask. Simply this: that so-called digital natives are often in the dark, or at least in dimly-lit rooms, when it comes to digital technology. Many so-called digital natives are in truth digital naïfs. The natives’ naïveté is considerable.

Are you registering a complaint about “the kids today” and all that?

Not at all. My claim — not complaint — involves skepticism about the engines of cultural supposition (also known as “the media”). Young adults are presented to us as ultra-savvy users of digital technology, living on their computers, able to run clichéd circles around those older than themselves. My observations suggest to me that reports of young adults’ digital expertise are often greatly exaggerated.

Examples?

Take word-processing. I find that significant numbers of college-age computer users do not know how to change the margins of a Microsoft Word document from 1.25″ (the Word default) to 1″ (the standard for academic writing). Significant numbers of students do not know how to change a document’s font from Calibri (the Word 2007 default) to Times New Roman (more or less the default for academic writing). Many students have no idea that Control+F (or Command+F) makes it easy to find one’s way through a piece of writing. And typographic details — em dashes, smart quotation marks, special characters — are often a mystery.

A friend tells me of students who have even blamed Windows 7 for their inability to change fonts and margins, which suggests some very odd beliefs about the powers of an operating system. I don’t think such explanations are disingenuous efforts to excuse plain carelessness. I’ve had students ask me how to change margins and fonts, and how I could be so sure that a font was, say, Arial and not Times New Roman.

File-types too seem to be beyond many students’ understanding. Many students don’t know how to save a document in something other than Microsoft’s proprietary .docx format. And why one might want to save in another format: there too, many students seem to be in the dark.

Well, that’s word-processing. Certainly things are different with the Internet.

I’m not so sure. Young adults are often adept in the workings of social media, but in other ways, many digital natives are at home in the dark. An inability to change margins in a Word document suggests a general lack of reliance upon a search engine — change margins word 2007 — as a source of answers to many of life’s small problems, don’t you think? I’ve observed too a general unfamiliarity with such Internet resources as Arts & Letters Daily, Boing Boing, Google Books, Google Maps, and Project Gutenberg, to name a few. That one can manage a university e-mail account with Gmail (or another online service) or keep up on items of interest via Google Alerts: these possibilities seem largely unknown. Most students of my acquaintance have been told that Firefox is a better choice than Internet Explorer, but very few are familiar with Firefox extensions. Thus the Internet for them has always been an ad-cluttered, Flash-filled mess. Digital naïfs are also in the dark about the ease with which the bits of one’s online life may be collected.

You mean embarrassing Facebook photos?

Awkward long-lived moments happen in all sorts of ways. Witness two students who gave an interview to a college newspaper about their leadership in a so-called War on Sobriety (a student group dedicated to drinking away the days of homecoming week). Three years later, that interview is the first or second item one finds with a Google search for either of their names. (Which makes me wonder what these students have gone on to do in their lives.) More recently, a student about to graduate has been quoted in the same newspaper as saying that he has no idea why he went to college or what he’s going to do after graduation. Not great stuff for a prospective employer to find via Google.

Sheesh — kinda dumb.

Well, yes. And there are more immediate dangers that come with indiscretion and over-sharing, as the Please Rob Me project has just made clear.

To my mind though, the saddest thing about digital naïfs online is that they seem not to understand that the Internet offers an endlessly renewable occasion for learning and wonder. How strange to have a world at your fingertips and only keep track of yourself and your friends.

So what do you suggest?

I think it’s helpful for anyone who teaches young adults to model the intelligent use of technology. When I distribute a syllabus in class, with three columns running down the page, I mention that I use columns to make the content more readable and more searchable and to save paper. (A syllabus, to my mind, should fit on the two sides of a single page.) When I send a file to students, I explain why I’ve sent it as a PDF. When I bring in online materials (images of Dickens cigarette cards, for instance), I explain how I found them. And I often mention useful and relevant stuff to be had online, with directions for finding it (“Search for x, y, &c.”).

It was a rare pleasure to hear the Rova Saxophone Quartet (est. 1977) in east-central Illinois. What most impressed me in the performance: the communication among the musicians and the beauty and range of sound they drew from their instruments. Glances, sideways movements, and hand signals marked shifts from one compositional episode to another, some wholly notated, some most likely recipes for rhythmic or tonal textures, flutters, overtones, wails. The sheer sound of the Rova quartet is an inspiring thing — sometimes massive and proclamatory, sometimes densely foggy, sometimes luminous and airy, always deeply disciplined and deeply expressive.

It’s difficult — and ultimately unnecessary — to slap a label onto the group’s work. Is it “jazz”? Is it “new music”? As Duke Ellington always insisted, there are only two kinds of music. Rova’s is the good kind.

Many thanks to Jason Finkelman, who runs the Sudden Sound concert series at the Krannert and brought Rova to Champaign.

It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

“Nice things happen to people who listen to radio eleven-three-oh in the metropolitan area”: just one assertion from almost nine minutes of WNEW jingles. I’m realizing only now how much of this stuff has stuck from my kidhood in “the metropolitan area.”

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

It is a minor but abiding happiness to know that I am not a quarter-Irish but half-Irish. A cousin did the research just a few years ago. Yes, our grandmother’s people came over from England, as my dad had been told. But what that meant was that they sailed to the States from England (Liverpool). They were Irish. Ah Ireland! Represent! Partly!

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

From an article on Fred Rogers and Pittsburgh, seven years after Rogers’ death and two years after PBS stopped offering Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as a daily show (shame on you, PBS):

In November, WQED, the local public television station here, decided to reinstall the Neighborhood of Make-Believe set at its studio where Mr. Rogers filmed his show from 1968 to 2001, with the intention that a couple of hundred people might show up to reminisce. Instead, a line stretched down the sidewalk, and more than 5,000 people over two days took the tour.

One bright note: PBS has online a handful of excerpts and complete shows. Go to PBS KIDS, and navigate through the Flash until you find a list of shows. The Neighborhood offerings include two complete operas, Spoon Mountain and Windstorm in Bubbleland (here called Neighborhood Opera).

A display of artists’ lists, from the Smithsonian — inventories, thoughts, to-dos. Alas, every image that’s large enough to read has a large repeating watermark that interferes with reading. So what’s the point? Bad move, Smithsonian.

My daughter Rachel reports that the Los Angeles garage where she parked before running a 5K race had a framed quotation from Marcel Proust atop its ticket-dispensing machine. Something about kicking butt and taking charge. Was it this passage, I asked?

[O]ur worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.

In an essay in The Oxford History of English Lexicography (ed. A. P. Cowie, 2009), Sidney I. Landau says that the selling strategy behind the New Standard Dictionary “might be summarized as, ‘Give them more for less,’ i.e. increase the coverage of vocabulary and package the book so that it can be sold cheaply.”

Ska, a desktop wallpaper for Mac by Jon-Paul Lunney, available from Simple Desktops. This wallpaper takes me back to 1979 or so.

I stick to Mac’s plain Aqua Blue, but Simple Desktops is a great resource. Thomas A. Watson describes his site as useful to anyone looking for “something that isn’t a beautiful photograph but also isn’t a gradient and drop shadowed mess with a little lens flare and some annoying copyright information in the corner.”

I would like to first express my respect for you and every other teacher that has placed their energy into educating me and my peers, as we all know that teachers are often the unappreciated foundation of our future. However, I must express a slight amount of disrespect, as I do not agree with your perception of my paper one bit.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Perhaps the iPad is just fine if you’re using it on the bus or at the office, but I have to wonder if Steve Jobs’ geniuses ever once stopped to think about what might happen, for example, if an aquatic mammal wanted to use his tablet while frolicking in a gentle ocean cove.

Monday, March 8, 2010

I learned lave years ago while reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). I still think of the novel whenever I see the word (as this post would seem to demonstrate). The word doesn’t appear in the novel, but it’s handy in what narrator Charles Kinbote calls “so-called word golf,” as it lets one make “hate-love in three”: hate, late, lave, love.

Other Pale Fire golf games: “lass-male in four,” “live-dead in five (with ‘lend’ in the middle).”

I will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This Panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds. . . . I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something.

“I can’t sit still on a chair reading comics or walk around the streets doing nothing. I certainly do enjoy collecting metal. It’s legitimate, not too heavy.”

Harvey Wang’s New York is a book of photographs of forty-nine New Yorkers in endangered or obscure lines of work. A mannequin maker, a rabbinical tailor, a scrap-metal collector, a seltzer bottler, a television repairman: each appears in a black-and-white portrait (35mm film), with a brief life-story on the facing page. Harvey Wang’s New York feels like a book that one might have found, once upon a time, in a used-book store. Improbably and wonderfully, the book is still in print. You can see samples at Harvey Wang’s website.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

I’ve gotten in the habit of reading to my students this passage from a 2005 commencement speech:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

It’s more difficult to find this speech online now that it’s been packaged as a book (one sentence per page). But here it is, still standing.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Many educators are pointing to Apple Computer’s recently announced iPad as the prototype for an e-reader that will be able to hold all the textbooks a student needs. Its color touch-screen, interactive-video capability and virtual keyboard, they say, give it greater potential for textbook users than monochrome readers like Amazon’s Kindle.

Apple has been quiet about its designs on the textbook business since unveiling its new device, which will go on sale this month.

“As a spouse, you have your little list of things that you jokingly won’t forgive your spouse for. Right after he started writing for the Times and attacking George Bush, we got an invitation to have dinner with Paul Newman and his wife, but he wouldn’t go. And now he’s dead.”

“It was inconvenient,” Krugman says. “I just don’t get any joy out of thinking, Oh, here I am with the movers and shakers. It would have required really discombobulating my schedule just to be able to say I’d had dinner with Paul Newman, and it’s not worth it.”

I think Krugman has it wrong. The point of having dinner with Paul Newman and “his wife” — who too has a name, Joanne Woodward — is not to be able to say that you had dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The point of having dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward is to have dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

One puzzle: A card in “Fred’s” wallet gives his address as 328 E. 23rd Street. The Chelsea district though is on the west side of Manhattan. A slip on the part of the movie-makers? Or is the point that Galt, recently arrived from San Francisco, misses the inconsistency?

As Galt says about another puzzle, later in the film, “All right, so it doesn’t add. What do you want me to do, call the Quiz Kids?”

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

See that guy in the sidebar to the right? See his beard, so manly yet so kempt? Behind that beard is a trimmer: the Wahl 9906-717 Groomsman. The 9906-717 works reliably and is surprisingly inexpensive ($14.99 at Amazon). And it has one great advantage over pricier, snazzier trimmers: it runs on AA batteries. In my experience, rechargeable trimmers quickly lose their ability to hold a charge.

I’ve been using a 9906-717 for at least a couple of years, changing the batteries once or twice at the most. My only connection to Wahl is that of a happy customer.

Other people too make things up: a 2005 PBS American Mastersepisode about John Hammond credits him with “discovering,” among others, Bessie Smith, Pete Seeger, and Robert Johnson. Oy. Hammond produced Smith’s final recordings in 1933. He signed Seeger to Columbia Records (first Columbia Seeger LP: 1961). And Robert Johnson was already dead when Hammond tried to find him for the 1938 Carnegie Hall concert “From Spirituals to Swing.”

“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”

Don’t look for premiums orcoupons, as the cost ofthe thoughts blended inORANGE CRATE ART pro-hibits the use of them.